by Mia Newberry
“I have something for you,” David told her and brought out the box when dessert was served. He sat the box in front of her.
The waitress was headed back to see if they needed anything, saw the box and knew from experience what it meant, she did a complete turn and went back to her station. She also knew from experience it was going to go one of two ways and five minutes was needed.
Jada opened the box and her eyes were bright. She picked up the ring and looked at it.
“David,” she said to him, “is this what I think it is?”
“Yes,” he said, putting it on her ring finger. “Jada, will you marry me?”
She threw her arms around him from across the table.
“Of course, did you have to ask?” she said weeping. “And one other thing: I’m pregnant.”
Chapter 8
David slept soundly that night as did Jada. He kept his hand on her stomach, wondering if he could feel the new life inside her. Jada made sure her hand with the engagement ring on it was high enough in the air that she could see it in the morning light. David told her he wanted to see her in the first rays of dawn by his side with the ring on her finger. He moved the bed when they went home so that it would face the window and catch those first few beams. It was early in the spring and they could sleep in as late as they wanted. When dawn broke he made sure to be in the corner of the bed watching the sunlight travel off her naked body and glitter on the diamond engagement ring she wore.
He had the waitress take a picture with the digital camera he’d brought along for the event. It wasn’t the best looking picture, but it would more than do for the company online newsletter and the announcement he was going to send out. The waitress had wanted to bring the other servers around to see the ring and of course she agreed. It was a wonderful evening punctuated by the knowledge that she was carrying his child. She almost hid her ring finger under her coat when they went to the SUV.
Jada was crying when they got into the vehicle. He opened the door for her and, very carefully, helped his fiancé into the passenger seat. When they got inside, he fastened the seat belt for her while she looked at the ring for the twentieth time.
“So when did you find out?” he asked her, while starting up the SUV. David had thought about buying one of the new electric cars, but he had so many things to think about.
“Today,” she said, beneath the tears. “I did one of those home pregnancy test kits last week and it came back positive, so I made and appointment with the doctor. His office called today and said I was three weeks pregnant.”
David started the vehicle and moved into Pittsburgh traffic. He had more than enough to plan right now. The wedding would have to be advanced, no way in hell was he going to be marrying the woman he loved and have her pregnancy showing. He wondered if it might be possible to do a quick civil wedding and have the fancy one later on. Push it back too far and they’d be hiring a sitter for the wedding. He started doing calculations in his head while trying to keep the traffic in mind. Things in his life were about to become very interesting.
“Are you disappointed with me?” she said beneath the tears.
“How could I be?” he told her, taking her hand and kissing it. “It took both of us to make the baby. We just have to advance the launch date that’s all.”
She tried to get angry with him for making light of her pregnancy, but she couldn’t. Jada hadn’t wanted to go back on the pill, trusting their observation of the calendar and using condoms whenever they had to. But they had been making love constantly and sooner or later one of those eggs was bound to get fertilized. It was the law of averages, one that could not be beat.
“Do you know when our baby was conceived?” he asked her. “I want to think the night I braided your hair. At least, it was the night I felt very special with you.”
“David,” she told him, “It could have been any one of the times we were together. Tell me, has there been a day we haven’t made love since I moved in with you?”
She had him there. David had given up trying to do much work from his condominium since Jada had come back into his life. All he had to do was bring her home in those dancer leotards and he was trying to pull them off her in seconds. One night they hadn’t made it past the landing of the stairs when she bent over to pick up something. Jada had stayed in that position for another half hour as David discovered the stairs made a good substitute for a couch back.
But now he was awake watching the morning light trace over her ebony body. David gently pulled the sheet off her and watched her naked form as she slept. He stared at her tummy and reflected on the life which was growing inside her. What would they name the child? They’d talked about that one before, one night after making love. They had decided the child would be named after her family if a girl and his if a boy. Or they might create a new name out of the parents’ name, which might make the name “Jaded” if a boy and “Davada” if a girl. He had almost suggested “Dada” as a girl’s name, but had wanted to make love at least one more time that night. He tilted in the direction of a new name for the personal name and something more conventional for the middle.
Jada woke to him looking at her. She held up the ring in the air to look at it again. Jada rose up on her knees and raised the ring to catch the sunlight again so she could watch the rays reflect off the wall. Jada leaned back to David and cuddled, telling him how much in love she was.
“I wonder what she or he will look like,” she said to him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “Any baby from you will be beautiful.”
“We’re going to have to make sure you’ll see the doctor every week,” he told her. “My mother had all kinds of problems when she had me.”
“But you came out alright,” she smiled.
“Yes, but I don’t want to take any chances,” he replied. “You’re going to be my wife and I want to take care of you.”
The engagement pictures went out to everyone they could think about. Jada had congratulations from her brothers and wanted to know when the wedding would take place. Her older brother Randal wanted to make sure it wasn’t a case of her having to get married and she assured him David had popped the question without her prompting him. David’s mother told her she wanted to meet her future daughter-in-law and his dad told him Jada looked like a fine woman from the picture. His sister wanted to know when the baby was coming and he told her not to worry, they had that angle take care of.
There was a big card attached to the door of his office when he went to work, signed by all the staff. His marketing manager wanted to know if they had met using the company matching service as it would be an excellent selling point. David had to disappoint him by telling the man no, he had known Jada years ago and had accidentally ran into her. However, it was a good idea and they should offer a bonus for any employee who met a prospective spouse using the company services.
Jada nearly caused the day’s classes to be canceled at the dance studio where she worked. She walked in normally, put her things in her locker and kept her hand hidden when she went out to greet the other instructors and students. When one the owner of the studio asked her how her weekend had been, she produced the big diamond on her hand.
“Holy Mother of God!” the studio said looking at the ring. “That thing is gigantic!”
“He took me out to dinner last night and asked me if I wanted to marry him,” Jada proudly announced.
“I’m guessing you agreed?” another dance instructor asked when she walked up. “Whew, put that thing down, the reflection from it is blinding me!”
Everyone crowded around to see it. And then all the students wanted to see it. And then all the mothers of the students who called all their friends who wanted to see a picture of it on a social network. Within an hour the photo of her diamond was flying across the internet. By the evening it was featured on the a few news stories and Jada decided to have it put into a safety deposit box. David went out and bought her a smaller ring she co
uld wear out daily.David began to worry as the wedding date approached. He decided to have a small wedding with a judge for the time. The larger one would have to wait. He wanted the world to know he’d married her in advance of the baby and she wasn’t “trapping” him or anything else so idiotic. The tabloid press would run any kind of absurdity if they smelled a scandal. He worried about their future. Plenty of computer empires had crashed over the years and nothing guaranteed his would last.
At night, he would lay awake watching her. She looked so beautiful and content in the darkness, with the light from a night lamp supplying the only illumination. He kept thinking about his child and how important it was that they leave some kind of legacy to the world. He started thinking about the thermonuclear power project that Jada’s professor had talked with him about looking into. It became more and more of an obsession with him. David was convinced the energy needs of earth could not be met by the current methods. Geothermal, wind, and solar power were too soft and unreliable. Nuclear fission reactors were just too damned dangerous. And the current methods, using petrochemical fuels, were just too polluting and inefficient. Not to mention it might run short in the near lifetime. He felt he had to do something and the pilot plant down in the Florida Keys was worth looking into. David had one of his employees look into the pilot plant which was under construction. The employee was a college intern from a prestigious school who was doing market research for David’s company. He pulled her off the project of finding new dating sites to acquire and told her he wanted to know everything possible about Dr. Ron Simmons, the renegade former government scientist who felt he could have the pilot up and running in a few years. He’d attracted some prestigious donors, but most of the people in his field didn’t think he had a chance of getting the plant operational unless he had access to a lot more money.
Jada was forced to cut back her teaching at the dance academy. Her pregnancy showed early, which made her proud, but caused some basic imbalances in her body form. She was still able to work as an instructor. This was helpful to her since Jada didn’t want to give it up; dance had been an important part of her life from an early age. She felt the movements had been helpful for her to get through school and an important part of her success and dealing with the death of her parents.
Her school work was going to suffer, but she could still rearrange the assignments, she needed to finish the work she had to do. There would be some work in the high-energy lab which she would need to postpone, but nothing too complicated. Her professors were supportive in what she was accomplishing. David agreed to shuttle her to and from college up to the time she might have to go into the hospital. Her doctor didn’t see a problem pregnancy, so she was hopeful of getting her research project accomplished.
David and Jada held their wedding in a private ceremony two months into her pregnancy. She was beginning to show a little bit, but she had no trouble fitting into the white dress she had chosen. Her oldest brother flew into Pittsburgh for the event and David’s parents drove over from Ohio to attend the ceremony which was done by a justice-of-the-peace at a small chapel above the city. They had decided to postpone the big wedding for a later date and agreed it would best for their child to be born before the wedding.
David’s mother pulled him aside the day before the wedding after meeting Jada and told him how wonderful she was and apologized for ever doubting his ability to make a decision on the woman he would marry. David told her he understood her apprehension, but Jada was a fine woman from an excellent family and the woman he wanted to be the mother of his children. When he told her that, she gave him her blessing and kissed David, telling him she would be looking forward to any grandchildren they would have. He didn’t tell her one was on the way.
It was a small wedding and one of Jada’s dance instructor friends stood in for the mother of the bride. Her brother helped out with the role which would normally go to her father. The entire wedding party didn’t number more than thirty people. David put the matching ring on her finger which he had made the same time as the engagement ring. Pictures were taken which would fly across the internet that evening again. Another announcement from the largest shareholders in a major Internet company.
They decided against a honeymoon for the present with Jada’s school work filling up more and more of her time. Plus, they wanted to concentrate on the future and the kind of home for their children. David felt the best thing for them would be to live in a free-standing house. He put his “swinging bachelor pad” condominium up on the market and found a modest house in a good neighborhood still accessible to the city with a decent amount of land around it. He and Jada were very specific in the kind of neighborhood they wanted for their family. She had been raised in the rural part of Mississippi and missed the quietness of the land. She also made sure it wasn’t a lily-white neighborhood and had a decent amount of black people. Jada well knew the stigma of being a minority and didn’t need a police officer to pull her over just because she was driving in the wrong development.
Still, David worried about the future. He worried about the kind of country his children would find themselves in every time there was another racial incident flaming across the news. What place would his children have, who would be considered “mixed”. Jada and he talked about it over many nights, wondering what and how to raise their family. She didn’t want a single child and confessed to David after attending a birthing class that her ideal family size was four children. David was so deeply in love with her he would have agreed to twelve.
Finally, David decided the time had come to fly down to the Florida Keys and see the pilot plant Dr. Simmons was building. If it was truly as revolutionary as he promised, it might be something they could invest in. If there was a way to make clean power for the future, he wanted to be involved. David had taken his computer software company to places no one had ever expected, was it so hard to believe he could work miracles for the energy industry? And if he was the one to do it, basing everything off what Jada had told him, what a boon it could be for the future. Someone had once told David the limit to a nation’s standard of living was the amount of energy available, but there was no lower limit. He decided to fly to the island of St. Matthew and see for himself what the good doctor was trying to accomplish.Jada insisted she go with him. It was she who had found the article which first alerted him to the work Simmons was doing down in the Florida Keys. She was the one who explained to him the whole concept of power by nuclear fusion. And it was her professor who had told him that the project warranted further looking into. Plus, she could talk the same language Simmons spoke when it came to physics, David would be out of his league. And any aid he might take down there with him would not have the same personal connection to the project that she did.
David was still concerned about her, even at the early stage of the pregnancy, but he agreed to let her go with him. They decided to tell everyone at David’s company and where she was teaching dance that they were going to take a mini-honeymoon to the Caribbean for a few days. They didn’t tell anyone the reason was to investigate a nuclear power plant under development.
The scientist who was working on the experimental plant had a strange reputation. He was a diligent worker who had won many awards all years he was employed by the government. He was organized in everything he did and wore the same style of white suit every day. Simmons was infamous for the quarrels he had with his colleges, although he usually won the argument. He had a dedicated group of followers around him, but was relentless on everyone who worked for him. Although he had yet to produce any power from his experimental plant, his break-down sheets on where the money went was detailed to the point of insanity. An accountant had noted Dr. Simmons even listed the cost of the private phone calls he made on the facility’s land lines.
But Simmons was still considered something of a divine being by the people who worked for him. He never had a problem attracting interns or laboratory help, many of who paid their own way down to his laboratory
and facility on the island. It was said that ten months of working under Dr. Simmons equaled ten years’ experience anywhere else.
After telling him they would like to tour the facility with some ideas of investing in his project by email, David and Jada left for the island of St. Matthews. The island was officially US territory, although the local population spoke a Caribbean patois version of English. The island was part of a group of small territories America had bought from Britain at the close of World War II. Most of the island survived on tourism, but there were a few local industries, such as fishing and agriculture.
They were forced to fly to Miami, and then take a smaller prop plane to the island since the runway wasn’t big enough to accommodate large passenger jets. They found the flight to St. Matthews bumpy and annoying but there wasn’t much they could do. They had a small room booked at a hotel near the facility and off the usual tourist areas. It was a quiet little place, but the beach was visible from their floor.
Jada dropped her luggage in the middle of the floor after David had paid the cab driver. The room was painted in pastel colors to make it seem festive. David pulled out his tablet computer, got a Wi-Fi connection and checked his email. The famous Dr. Simmons had yet to answer their latest email. He had initially agreed to let them tour his lab, but only if they were escorted everywhere they went.
“Man really knows how to attract investors,” David said while searching for any new email. He looked over at Jada, who had stripped down and was headed into the shower. Their sex life had diminished rapidly the further along her pregnancy had progressed. He still wanted to be with her as much as possible, just that they had to be careful. He was even more excited than his new wife about the arrival of a baby. David was constantly looking at baby furniture on the internet with her.
